Day: November 18, 2004

I’m still a passionate believer in the potential of RSS (Really Simple Syndication)  as a means of distributing, delivering and receiving online content, whether it’s press releases, opinion articles or technical updates, RSS provides a powerful means of keeping an audience informed.

Of course, the major drawback of RSS continues.  It is hard to measure and it’s annonymous.  For many PR people this is a problem.  How can you tell that someone is actually subscribed to your feed?

In addition, while blogging�which is easier to understand and in many respects more entertaining�gets all the headlines, RSS continues to proliferate behind the scenes.  Just look at some of the more recent news.  IBM now offers full RSS feeds of all their news, Yahoo! are ramping up their RSS expertise, the US Government is catching on to RSS and BusinessWire is now offering RSS access to its wire services.

Incidentally, we’ve been providing RSS feeds for over two years now and the numbers of subscribers are growing significantly every month.

Guillaume du Gardier has posted an interesting interview with Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked, a company that is promising to simplify the process of distributing PR-related content as RSS.

“Given that PR agencies handle on a daily basis corporate communication material for their clients, such as press releases, media coverage, events, analyst coverage, etc, they are in a great position to provide a value added service by re-using this content.

 

The PR agency can manage their clients RSS channels, and provide the monthly RSS measurement information to demonstrate the business value of such an initiative to the client.

 

It also demonstrates to the client, that the PR agency is at the fore front of providing unique value added services, which can act as a differentiator in client pitches.”

I’m meeting with Fergus next week, so if anyone has any questions for him let me know 🙂

Some RSS Resources:

• Aggregators Attack Information Overload (Wired)
• Can RSS Relieve Information Overload? (EContent Magazine)
• Beginning the Journey: A Look at RSS (MediaInsider)
• Why RSS is good enough for PR (PR Opinions)
• RSS and Public Relations Redux (PR Opinions)
• RSS 101: Getting Up and Running (PR Opinions)
• RSS Hits Critical Mass (Dan Gillmor)
• Using RSS for Corporate Communications  (Phil Gomes)

 

“I wish public-relations people would get with the program, too. If they’d only start creating RSS feeds of releases, journalists and the public at large could see the material they want, and the PR industry would be able to stop blasting huge amounts of e-mail to people whose inboxes are already over-cluttered. Of course, there will continue to be a use for e-mail in PR, but the volume could be cut substantially.”  Dan Gillmor

Two new PR blogs to keep an eye on:

• Mason Cole’s Vy Blog
• Ian Lipner’s From the Frontlines of PR (occasional postings)

 

One of the bonuses (?) of the proliferation of blogs is that they provide a window into events or angles on events that you would have been hard pushed to find in the past.

One good example is PR agency bashes. 

Whether its Text 100 (my alma mater) opening a new San Francisco office, or Bite Communications opening their new office or even the Horn Group celebrating 13 years in business you can find out all you want….

Of course that may be a blog too far… but interesting all the same.

Footnote:

Party coverage courtesy of Tom Foremski.